The Clangers films were first shown in 1969, the year man landed on the moon. They were described by a NASAscientist as an attempt to bring a note of realism to the fantasy of the Space Race.".

The charmingly surreal series concerns the daily life and adventures of the Clangers--a race of highly civilised, small, bright pink, long-nosed mouse type people who stand upright on oversized feet. They talk in a high pitched whistlinglanguage that makes perfect sense to you until the tragic day on which you hit puberty.

They have large animated ears that they pull over their eyes when are sad or distressed.

The Clangers live inside a small blue cratered planet (with the craters covered with metal lids) inside which they hide from the cold and the plethora of objects falling from space.

Other inhabitants include the Soup Dragon, who lives in the soupwell and who provides the Clangers with green soup and blue-string pudding; the Glow Buzzers which provide light for the Clangers' caves and tasty Glow Honey for the Clangers' pantry; the conjuring froglets, inexplicably strange sideways orange, oval stick-legged creatures which travel in a top hat and live in a vertical pond deep within the planet; and the skilled inventor the Iron Chicken.

p.s. until I was given a video of the Clangers a few years ago, I was convinced that the show was made in black and white. Discovering the extreme pinkness of the little beasts was a shock from which I have still not quite recovered.

According to Oliver Postgate, the voices are created by speaking the script through a slide whistle as it was played. The BBC insisted on script changes because the original version of the text was just too rude and sweary. That said, the squeezable talking clanger dolls do say, "Oh, bugger. The bloody door's stuck again." Allegedly.

A while back, I discovered The Clangers. I was strangely turned on by their voices.

Months later, I fired up Cool Edit and played with the "Ringing A's" filter a while, eventually isolating one 'A' and moving it up to 1000 Hz. It reminded me of Morse code in a heavy echo chamber. I brought out the Morse aspect by gating the signal at approximately the average volume. Then I realized that an easier way to generate the envelope would be to apply a heavy low-pass filter to noise and cut out the negative strokes.

noise(20 s)

sci_filter(butterworth lowpass 10 Hz order 6)

distort(splines, positive place point at -30 dB -> 0 dB, negative to silence)

AM with tones(500 Hz sine)

pitchbender(squirrely)

I felt turned on in the same way.

Hours later, it hit me: that's the voice of The Clangers! I changed a few of the parameters and implemented the filter chain in straight C, using a cheesy way to generate low-pass noise with a cubic filter.